Daniel Walter Brunish: Pottstown veteran of World War I and entrepreneurial icon

By Michael T. Snyder, 21st Century Media

Saturday, November 2, 2013

POTTSTOWN — There were 500 to 600 men from the Pottstown area who served in World War I. Of these, 151 were members of the Pottstown National Guard Company that became part of Company A, 111th Regiment of the 28th Division, an outfit that was made up entirely of Pennsylvania National Guardsmen.

This division was in combat from mid-July until the armistice in 1918. During that time, they had been raked by machine guns, pelted with artillery shells and gassed. And they were in the front lines when the orders came to stop the fighting. In Company A, the message came too late for the 12 men who were already dead and the 43 who were wounded, but the survivors were then fairly certain they would come home to Pottstown alive.

Another five months passed before they left Europe, and their ship finally docked in New York. A few weeks later, on May 4, 1919, at Fort Dix, N.J., they once again became private citizens, free to come and go as they pleased. It pleased many to return to their homes in Pottstown.

Among them was Daniel Walter Brunish. Born in Pottstown on Oct. 17, 1893, Brunish was a son of August and Augusta (Kupfer) Brunish, German immigrants who settled in Pottstown in the early 1880s.

August Brunish was a skilled carpenter and builder. About 1890, he erected four houses on Hamilton Street on Pottstown’s Washington Hill and moved his family into one of them. Hamilton Street still exists, but it has to be one of the most obscure streets in the borough. Beginning east of Grant Street, it consists of about 50 feet of dirt road that ends at a fence that borders Hill School property.

On Christmas Eve of 1894, the Brunish home was destroyed by fire. Only a year old, Dan Brunish was sound asleep when the blaze was discovered late that night and was carried to safety by his sister, Christine, who went into the snow in her bare feet.

The fire was a major disaster for the family. Due to low water pressure that hampered firemen’s efforts and a strong wind, the blaze destroyed all four of August Brunish’s houses. However, the intrepid contractor rebuilt his house, and the 1900 federal census lists the family’s address as 79 Hamilton St.

By 1910, Daniel Brunish had left school and was working at the local bridge works. Sometime after that, he, like many other young men in Pottstown, joined the local National Guard Company, which had a new armory on King Street.

His membership in the guard was his ticket to France to lead the life of a soldier in combat. For some people, New Year’s Day is spent nursing a throbbing head from the excesses of the night before. On New Year’s Day of 1918 Brunish also had a headache, not from over-indulgence, but from a German bullet that inflicted a serious scalp wound that kept him in the hospital for months. It could have been worse. As he noted in a postcard to his future wife, “Now I know why we wear helmets.”

After he was released from the hospital, Brunish spent days trying to catch up with his old outfit which, as he wryly noted, always “kept a day’s march and a month’s pay ahead of him.”

Brunish, like many children of his generation, didn’t graduate from high school because the economic reality of the times made it necessary for them go to work as young teens. Despite his lack of formal education, the letters and postcards he wrote from France show his great eye for detail and a flare for writing.

The Pottstown newspaper published a letter he wrote to his mother in July of 1918. One excerpt reveals his talent. “I wish you could see the aeroplanes do battle,” he told her. “They twist and turn and dive and loop the loop and keep banging away at each other. After a bit one will just flutter up there like a piece of paper and down he will come.”

Brunish was so captivated by these machines that he “wished he could go up in one of them,” and he claimed, “It’s got automobiling skinned to death.”

Dan Brunish came back to his hometown and went to work at McClintic Marshall Steel. In 1921 he married his girlfriend, Sarah Catherine Jones. Known to all as Sadie, the future Mrs. Brunish was a registered nurse who spent part of the war working in a hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y., because it was a place where she felt she could do the most good by caring for wounded soldiers returning from Europe.

After years of working at McClintic Marshall and then Bethlehem Steel, Brunish made a bold career change. After some prodding by Sadie, on Feb. 13, 1937, during the Great Depression, he left his secure job as a foreman and night superintendent and he and his wife opened a grocery store in their home at 577 Lincoln Ave.

Today, run by their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Brunish’s is a Pottstown institution, and the store’s hot dogs and hot sausage sandwiches are famous well beyond the borough’s borders.

Dan’s cheerful disposition and his physical stature -- he was over 6 feet tall and by 1940 tipped the scales well north of 200 pounds -- led to his becoming a Pottstown icon for his portrayal of Santa Claus. Throughout the 1940s he donned his costume and appeared at countless children’s Christmas parties sponsored by Pottstown service clubs. He created such a realistic Santa that his photo graced the covers of three issues of Pottstown on Parade.

Dan Brunish died of heart failure in the Pottstown Hospital, Monday, April 14, 1949. Though he has been gone for 64 years, there are still plenty of Pottstonians who fondly remember his appearances as Santa Claus and several generations who enjoy the business that he and Sadie created.